Facebook: Details of 1 million accounts sold for $5- Tech News

LONDON: A blogger has claimed to have bought information of 1.1 million Facebookusers for just five dollars.

The company, which has recently been accused that users' privacy is undermined, is now facing claims that a blogger was able to buy email addresses and user IDs, which were not publicly available.

In recent months Facebook has been accused of allowing private messages to be made public in their new 'timeline' feature - an allegation they have strongly denied.

According to the Daily Mail, users' private information is valuable to companies wanting to advertise to audiences.

Bulgairan Bogomil Shopov, a blogger and digital-rights activist, claimed that he was able to buy data containing names, user IDs and email addresses.

He also alleged that Facebook later asked him to delete his post detailing the purchase, the report said.

Shopov claimed that he bought the data from a user called 'Mertem' on digital odd-jobs board Gigbucks, where users offer to perform tasks in exchange for payments between five and 50 dollars.

"The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Canada, UK and Europe," Mertem apparently wrote in the sales description.

According to the report, Facebook said it would investigate how the data entries were obtained.

"Facebook is vigilant about protecting our users from those who would try to expose any form of user information. In this case, it appears someone has attempted to scrape information from our site," a spokesperson said.

Resource:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/social-media/Facebook-Details-of-1-million-accounts-sold-for-5/articleshow/17001632.cms